Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups - "My Gun Is The Jury! And Other Stories," "Buffy" and Grief, More

What I've Been Into...

EC Artists' Library: "My Gun Is The Jury! And Other Stories" This volume of Fantagraphics' long-running, excellent series of artist-focused EC Comics reprints puts the focus on two comic book geniuses — Jack Davis and Wally Wood — and their work for Mad's lesser-known but nearly as excellent sister publication Panic!

Where Mad famously batched its satire into various "departments" that poked fun at various aspects of pop culture and mid-century American life, the focus of the Panic! stories included here is almost exclusively on the movies. We're offered lampoons of numerous flicks, ranging from "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "A Star is Born" to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

While the then-cutting-edge satire of the stories is now as dated as the movies they target, film and nostalgia buffs are still likely to get a chuckle out of them.

Scripters Al Feldstein and Jack Mendelsohn (later one of the screenwriters of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine") provide some imaginatively funny twists in each tale, along with lots of eye-rolling puns. But what's most notable, of course, is the fabulous art.

Davis was one of the best caricaturists in history, as is witnessed by his many covers for TV Guide and various news magazines, but Wood was no slouch, either. His Bogie, Hepburn, James Mason and John Wayne are all excellent here, capturing the look and expressions of each star in humorous fashion. And his inks, of course, are sublime. Nobody to this day is/was better with a pen or brush.

Along with the Panic! tales, the book includes a batch of Wood's earliest work for EC, which was penciled/inked in collaboration with artist Harry Harrison, who went on to success as a sci-fi author (his novel "Make Room! Make Room!" was the basis for "Soylent Green"), along with a previously uncollected version of the classic Mad story "V-Vampires!" by Wood and Harvey Kurtzman

Fans of EC, Mad, Davis, Wood, or all of the above will enjoy this collection. You can order it via Bookshop.org.

Reads:

Via Literary Hub: On Grief and Growing Up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, at its core, a show about grief. To me, it is even more about grief than it is about love, or magic, or witty remarks, or maybe even power, because it is about being a teenager, and being a teenager is about grief.

Wait a second, all the adults with jobs are saying to themselves. Being a teenager isn’t about grief. Teenagers don’t know how good they have it! Which is true. But being a teenager is about grief because being a teenager is about change. You’re mourning your childhood, and you’re mourning your innocence, and you’re mourning the fact that the people who are supposed to love you don’t know you anymore, or at least don’t understand you. Later, of course, the show becomes about trying to become an adult—see Buffy’s doomed day job at the Doublemeat Palace—and that is an exercise in grief too. Then there’s Angel, which is ultimately a show about the grief of being an adult, because Angel is essentially a story about futility.

Life, it turns out, is a show about grief, I am sorry to report.

It’s been a hard year for Buffy fans. Tony Head died at 72. Nicholas Brendon died at 54, in March. This is not even to mention Michelle Trachtenberg, who died last year—can you believe it was only last year?—at 39. I’m not a fan of this pattern. Maybe it has something to do with the hellmouth so obviously opening under the whole of the United States, if not in fact the world. Maybe we’re just unlucky.

I was particularly struck by the outpouring of love for Tony Head, and the way that clips of him were passed around online as a way of mourning. Nothing new for the age of the internet. But these were not clips of him in his most recent high profile role, in another beloved show, Ted Lasso, where he plays a villain (also named Rupert). No, they were all clips of Giles (apart from a few of the Nescafé Gold Blend ads). We mourned him as Giles, as the best father figure that ever refused to judge us, that ever did kill Ben (who might know Glory) for us, that was ever there, until he thought it might save us for him not to be. Of course, we—I—don’t know Tony Head. It helps that by all accounts he was a great person, that he was also the father figure on set, that he seemed to care for others in his regular life and in his work. But we don’t know him. We’ve been mourning Giles.

But of course, Giles is just as alive as ever.

Giles exists, whenever we want to look. We have exactly as much of him as we did before. There’s an entire other conversation to be had about parasocial relationships in the modern era, obviously, but since Buffy isn’t really from the modern era, I do think it speaks to the power of the character, the acting and the writing, and to the universe of the show itself, that the average fan feels they’ve lost something.